Fronteras

Jeff Boatman has been flying helicopters for 40 years. For the past several years,  his route has been taking him into the Grand Canyon, delivering supplies to the Havasupai Tribe.  One morning last November, his transmission froze. He steered the helicopter away from power lines. And as he approached the ground the blades suddenly stopped turning and the helicopter crashed to the ground, trapping Boatman inside. He found his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. Rosie Rodriquez answered the call.

"Flagstaff 911."

" I’m in a helicopter crash."

As the Saint Jude Catholic Church's sanctuary reverberated with the tunes of a Spanish language band shortly before mass on Sunday evening, Amparo Gonzalez, 56, sat in a nearby pew, thumbing through this week’s church bulletin.

There, stamped on page two in English and Spanish, was a stern letter from San Diego’s bishop, Robert Brom, calling President Obama's recent rule requiring that religious institutions' health plans cover contraception unjust. He said it violated the collective Catholic conscience.

For people of the Navajo Nation, AIDS has long been thought of as a white man’s disease; an illness that struck others, off of the reservation.

But over the last decade, the number of new HIV infections among Navajos has doubled. And something else that’s new: AIDS is now very much on the reservation itself, which means Navajos are infecting Navajos.

PART ONE: In the United States, one out of every three children is overweight. At one Flagstaff school, almost half of the children are considered overweight or obese. For the first time in many generations today's children will have shorter life spans than their parents because they're prone to high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. In the first part of the Changing America Desk childhood obesity series, Laurel Morales looks at the link between culture and obesity.